Instant access will be maintained to all of the Elsevier titles. However, in order to balance the budget, 90 titles are being converted from purchase to rental access. Seven of these titles are health sciences journals.

Despite the loss of permanent archival access to articles in these 90 journals from 2017 forward, the total cost of the Elsevier package is still over $1 million dollars a year, and will continue to increase by $50,000+ per year for each of the next 3 years under the terms of the new contract.

Alternate online access

Despite being removed from their respective packages, we will maintain complete online access to current issues for the following titles through alternate routes:

Negotiations have been completed with Wiley, Springer, Sage and Elsevier on the journal packages that we license with these publishers, reducing our total spend by $550,000, which will be applied to the $1.2 shortfall in the MU Libraries collections budget. The cancellation decisions were informed by usage, cost, and user feedback.

As a result of these cuts, instant article access will not be available for these health sciences titles from Wiley, Springer and Sage. While we will retain online access to back issues for the cancelled titles, articles from 2017 forward will need to be requested via Interlibrary loan. Most articles arrive within two business days.

Alternate online access

Despite being removed from their respective packages, we will maintain complete online access to current issues for the following titles through alternate routes:

Instant access will be maintained to all of the Elsevier titles. However, in order to balance the budget, 90 titles, amounting to about $300,000 in subscriptions, are being converted from purchase to rental access. Seven of these titles are health sciences journals.

Despite the loss of permanent archival access to articles in these 90 journals from 2017 forward, the total cost of the Elsevier package is still over $1 million dollars a year, and will continue to increase by $50,000+ per year for each of the next 3 years under the terms of the new contract.

We will be reviewing our Oxford University and University of Chicago journal packages during the spring semester of 2017 as steps towards preparing for an anticipated cancellation process in FY2018.

These cuts are especially difficult for us in the Health Sciences realm, since prior to this reduction our collections spending lagged a half of a million dollars below our peer health sciences libraries, and was only about one half the amount our aspirational peer health sciences libraries have available to spend on their collections.

Cuts this deep will undoubtedly be felt. We will continue to monitor usage and impact, and to address collection needs to the extent that our budget allows.

Your article has been accepted for publication in a journal and, like your colleagues, you want it to have the widest possible distribution and impact in the scholarly community. In the past, this required print publication. Today you have other options, like online archiving, but the publication agreement you’ll likely encounter will actually prevent broad distribution of your work.

You would never knowingly keep your research from a readership that could benefit from it, but signing a restrictive publication agreement limits your scholarly universe and lessens your impact as an author.

Why? According to the traditional publication agreement, all rights —including copyright — go to the journal. You probably want to include sections of your article in later works. You might want to give copies to your class or distribute it among colleagues. And you likely want to place it on your Web page or in an online repository if you had the choice. These are all ways to give your research wide exposure and fulfill your goals as a scholar, but they are inhibited by the traditional agreement. If you sign on the publisher’s dotted line, is there any way to retain these critical rights?

Pricing for 2017 subscriptions is starting to come in, and once again, their prices are increasing. These journals are among a list of 21 subscriptions that will cost the University Libraries $6000 more in 2017 than a year ago. That's an increase between 15-25%.

Meanwhile, US inflation for 2017 is projected to be about 2%; nowhere near the average increase of journal subscriptions featured in the list.

Many disciplines are impacted by these subscription price increases, not just the health sciences:

The Health Sciences Library journal list has been updated to show the latest cancellation decisions. A total of $101,116 was cut from these subscriptions under the control of the Health Sciences Library – a cut of about 20%.

As previously announced, book purchasing will also be drastically curtailed this year as a further cost saving measure.

Subject and title lists of journals being cancelled across all the campus libraries have also been posted and will be updated as needed throughout the fall semester.

Contract negotiations are underway with Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Sage and Oxford, and we will share information on the future of those journal packages as it becomes available.

These cuts are in addition to reductions to University Libraries centrally-administered journal subscription packages fromElsevier, Wiley, Sage, Oxford and Springer.Any cuts to journals in those packages will be in addition to, not in the place of the $100,00 journal cut facing the Health Sciences Library.

In order to address the $1.2M collections shortfall faced by the campus libraries, the Health Sciences Library will only have approximately $20,000 in total book funds available in FY2017.

This is approximately $40,000 less than we normally spend on books in a year.

We will also lose access to roughly 3000 online clinical books July 1 when the MOBIUS consortium eMO subscription ends, as there is no money to continue it.

The only way to address this shortfall would be to cut even deeper into our journal budget, where we are already tasked with cutting about $71,000 in subscriptions.

We plan to continue buying books on demand to the extent that we are able, given our reduced circumstances. Once the book fund is exhausted, we will keep the requests on file to buy when money is available again.

In the meantime, you can continue to request books on interlibrary loan at no cost to you.

Faced with the prospect of cutting about 20% of our collections budget and having reviewed the subscriptions from the largest publishers, the campus libraries are beginning a review our Springer, Sage and Oxford journal subscriptions, which account for close to $700,000/year of the library collection budget.

Based on past usage patterns and an analysis of alternate access to some of these titles, we will be trimming our subscription spending with these publishers by substituting article-based access and interlibrary loan for the journals that are less used by our campus community, or duplicated elsewhere.

Since this shortfall represents 20% of the collection budget for the campus libraries, we have been asked to prepare for a 20% cut across all of our collections.

That will amount to around $77,000 for the Health Sciences Library.

Sadly, most of this will have to come from our journal subscriptions, since we had already pared back our book spending in 2011 when we started purchasing books only on demand.

We will do our best to minimize the impact of these cuts, but they will be painful because they are so deep. In many cases, we will have to settle for access rather than ownership of needed material – hardly a sound or sustainable strategy for building or maintaining a research library collection.